Abstract:

“You must study ...”; “Get on with your homework”; “Finish your project” are orientations that students with attention problems frequently receive. Nevertheless, the exact meaning of each of those tasks is uncertain for many of them. These are skills that most students develop over time, since the beginning of their school trajectory, in an intuitive and naturalistic way - students are not usually taught how to study, to keep up with homework, or how to do projects. Thus, there are students that reach the final years of their school education without completely grasping the meaning of those concepts and without consolidated operational guidelines to implement them. Consequently, they get behind, frequently veering away from school and all that relates to it.

In those cases, it is fundamental to teach planning and study skills to the student and to assist him in putting those skills into practice. This is usually the role of a Tutor (whether formal or informal), usually a teacher or a psychologist that assumes the responsibility of teaching and guiding the student in this process.

Empower Me Virtual Tutor is a web application built for these tutors to facilitate the communication between Tutor and Student and to organize the study process. The tool is being developed by a Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training KA2 (Project Empower me! with sufficient attention and tempered hyperactivity, 2018-1-FR01-KA202-047991). This presentation intends to explain the rationale for the web application and briefly demonstrate how it works in the development of self-regulated learning. The team piloted the implementation of the web application in the partner schools during the first semester of 2021, assisting selected teachers and students to implement tutoring practices using the tool. In this presentation, we will describe the piloting protocol as well as the preliminary results in terms of usability and usefulness of the Virtual Tutor. Results were obtained from four teacher-student dyads, from French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese middle, and secondary schools. Considerations about future steps in the development of the web application and about its relevance in the promotion of communication and self-regulated learning both in a traditional school setting or in the context of distance education will conclude the presentation.

Keywords:

Virtual Tutor, self-regulated learning, international project.